PC World tested in 13 different cities, and sadly Houston wasn’t among them, but they did check connections in Dallas. The others were Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle and Washington, D.C.

AT&T turned in the best 4G download speeds overall, while Verizon took the crown for 4G uploads nationwide. However, AT&T topped the download rankings in only 11 out of the 13 cities, because it doesn’t yet offer its new LTE network in every place that PC World tested.

In the 3G category, T-Mobile took first place both for download and upload speeds. This is because PC World put T-Mobile’s HSPA+ 21 service in the 3G column. As is typical of the confusion of wireless carrier marketing, T-Mobile sells HSPA+ 21 as 4G, but also has a faster HSPA+ 42 service, which PC World chose to use in its 4G rankings. Got that?

Sprint came in last in both the 3G and 4G categories. In the nationwide 3G numbers, it poked along at just over a half a megabyte per second in both uploads and downloads. In the 4G rankings, its slower WiMAX service couldn’t keep up with either T-Mobile’s HSPA+ or AT&T and Verizon’s LTE offerings. It will be interesting to see what happens next year, once Sprint’s LTE launches. Houston will be one of the first cities to get Sprint’s LTE,likely starting next month.

Another interesting note: 3G download and upload speeds tested this time around were higher overall than inlast year’s survey. That’s probably the result of carriers adding more bandwidth on the back end as they build out their faster LTE networks. This kind of infrastructure improvement benefits all users of mobile broadband.

While T-Mobile mostly dominated 3G in 11 of the 13 locations, the survey found four distinct patterns in the 4G category:

In five cities (Atlanta, Boston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and San Francisco), AT&T swept the 4G upload and download competitions; in four (Denver, New Orleans, San Jose, and Seattle), Verizon swept both; and in the remaining four (Chicago, Dallas, New York, and Washington, D.C.), Verizon won for uploads and AT&T for downloads. Notably, in two of the cities where Verizon ruled (Denver and Seattle), AT&T doesn’t offer 4G LTE service.

As you might expect, AT&T did best in the 3G category in Dallas, beating T-Mobile in both download and upload speeds. Dallas is home to Ma Bell 2.0’s corporate headquarters, so it would have been a tad embarrassing if the company had been smoked in its own hometown. AT&T had the fastest 4G download speeds in Dallas, but lost to Verizon in 4G uploads.

While Houston was not a tested city, the overall results generally match the tests I’ve done with different 3G and 4G devices. AT&T’s LTE network isfaster than Verizon’s in Houston, for example, and T-Mobile’s HSPA+ speeds are very good in the 3G category.